Pacific Commons

Pacific Commons is a master-planned, mixed-use development consisting of 840 acres in Fremont, California currently in development by Catellus Development Corporation. It sits on part of the site of what was once the Fremont Dragstrip/Baylands Raceway Park and the Skyways Airport, a glider field. Given Fremont's location at the Northern tip of Silicon Valley, Catellus originally planned the development to house primarily high-tech research and development operations with a moderate amount of retail and restaurant space, a convention center, and a hotel. Until the dot-com bubble, Cisco Systems had planned to relocate its headquarters to Pacific Commons and consolidate substantially all of its San Francisco Bay Area operations to a large campus in Pacific Commons, which would have consisted of several high-rise office buildings. With the downturn in the technology industry, however, Cisco put its plans on hold. While it is unclear whether Cisco will ultimately relocate its headquarters to Fremont, in 2011 Cisco purchased 149 acres of vacant land in Fremont, most of it from Catellus, fueling speculation that, at some point, it will move forward with its headquarters move to Pacific Commons.To mitigate environmental impacts caused by the massive of the project, Catellus donated hundreds of acres of land along the southern and western boundaries of Pacific Commons to the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Further environmental mitigation involved building a causeway as a portion of Cushing Parkway over the wetlands preserve from Pacific Commons southward to Fremont Boulevard and Interstate 880 near the Fremont Marriott Hotel. Today, Pacific Commons contains more than one million square feet of research and development and industrial space, including a half-million square-foot distribution center for Office Depot. More than one hundred acres of land slated for research and development uses remains undeveloped.